This was clearly a great overeach. There are 2.3 million uniformed men and women in the US Armed Forces. There will of course be murders and rapes. But I was sure that the rate of rape in the military was much lower than the civilian rate but could not find the research to refute it. Now we have found that research. A research paper prepared by Duke University Law found that violent crime and rape rates in the military were much lower than civilian rates controlling for age and gender. An excerpt of the study below

The authors then go into a long and confusing discourse shown below. The rape rate is still substantially below the civilian world.

The bottom line of the Duke study is that rape is still much less in the military services than in the civilian world, controlling for age.

So we have had to endure an enormous assault when the truth was altogether different. What a circus.I met a young woman on the airplane two days ago. She was training as a nurse but concerned about the cost of tuition. "How about the military?" I said. "They will pay your tuition and you are then Commissioned as a Lieutenant for a 3 year payback". She told me she was considering it but would probably not enlist because of the epidemic of rape. So we lost the services of this young women and she lost an opportunity because of a mediality.Did the media know what they were doing?

Many of them don't worry about the truth as long as they have a juicy story.Some probably knew but did not care.Some were too dull to know.

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Why did the military not fight back? Most of the generals probably did not know the truth. They are after all military guys, not social scientists. And to try to respond would get you pilloried in the press. So they hunker down and require more classes on sexual harassment.In a Presidential campaign the spokesman for the campaign aggressively combat the assertions made by the other side. Ditto a major corporation under attack. But the Pentagon just stood and took it and promised to try harder.And of course the three surveys that this "epidemic" was based on were done through Congressional action.FUTUREWhat should the military do in the future? Hire an outstanding General and a top notch academic researcher. They both must be articulate and personable and able to respond to wild allegations. And they both need to be women. Their office should be on top of the rape and sexual harassment issue, working hard to reduce it while also understanding the truth.They should update the studies that prove that rape is lower in the military and the outside world and have those studies on the internet.